Don’t let AI ruin the em dash
In defense of the newly controversial punctuation mark, which has become a target for those determined to root out AI writing.
A few weeks ago my 16-year-old son Laszlo, a student journalist, received a tip for his school newspaper: A source had told him that the administration—which had banned all use of AI—had used it to write an email to parents.
The email in question was certainly boring enough to be written by ChatGPT. But it was also boring enough to be written by a school administrator. We ran the text through two AI detection tools (Originality.ai and QuillBot), and both determined that there was a 0% chance a computer wrote it. I don’t know how a computer figures out if it’s dealing with another computer, but I’m guessing it asks which of nine photos are motorcycles.
So why did this source think AI had written it? Because the email contained em dashes.
The em dash, a punctuation mark a bit longer than a hyphen that denotes a long pause, has become the black light on the hotel sheets for AI-shamers—a sign that an essay, a letter or any kind of written work was written by a machine and not by a human.
“The em dash is now a GPT-ism and is not advisable unless you want people to think your writing is the output of a LLM," wrote a user named energy123 on Hacker News. On Instagram, the beauty influencer LuxeGen warned that if people don’t want to be accused of using AI they should “take out the ChatGPT hyphen."
Last week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X the following brag: “Small-but-happy win: If you tell ChatGPT not to use em dashes in your custom instructions, it finally does what it’s supposed to do!"
All this em-dash shaming has been upsetting. Because I, a professional writer, love—love—love—an em dash.
In my writing, ChatGPT tells me I use 11 em dashes every 1,000 words. Other professional writers use them a lot too—4.4 times more than the average person. These numbers, upon investigation, could be highly inaccurate since I got them from ChatGPT, which explains one reason why my son’s school bans it. But the point is, em dashes are beloved by professionals.
Why? Because more than any other punctuation mark, the em dash is deeply human. It’s the breath marks of Emily Dickinson, the stream of consciousness of Virginia Woolf, the head-clogging maximalism of David Foster Wallace, the self-aggrandizing asides of Joel Stein.
It’s also the mark of digression. When Holden Caulfield tells his reader that he loves it when his classmates digress during a presentation, he says: “I don’t like it when somebody sticks to the point all the time. The boys that got the best marks in Oral Expression were the ones that stuck to the point all the time—I admit it." And he admits it, naturally, with an em dash.
Large language models consume a lot of the best writing out there. Which is why they use em dashes. Unlike most people today, who think a period is a rude way of screaming, AI believes in punctuation.
If there is anything to take away from the em-dash scare it’s that we should use more of them. Because while most people can’t find one on their keyboard and wouldn’t know when to use it if they did, the em dash requires more nuance than a thumb’s up, a heart or an eggplant.
It’s less jarring than parentheses but a bigger interruption than commas. It’s the length of an “m," which sets it apart from the boring, shorter en dash. In the men’s locker room for writers, we make fun of en dashes.
Most of all we should use em dashes because they are a declaration of humanity in the face of AI’s onslaught. If only ordinary people would learn how to use them.
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